Welcome back. The other day we talked about how less is more and delved into a little bit of history in modern horror. We talked about using implication to scare rather than crude shock value. But that which is shocking does have its place. The problem is that it takes a very subtle and clever approach to make it work. If shock magic is something you'd like to work with, then please consider the following words.
Shock Jocking
There is something inherently intriguing and yet repulsive about our own viscera. The hardest thing in the world to watch for most people is a video of an actual surgical procedure. The sight of blood and organs puts us on edge, inspires in us first the paralysis of fear and then the desire to flee as quickly as possible. And yet we can't help but stare at the spectacle to satisfy our curiosity.
In cinema, this has led to what film critics and analysts call "the spectacle of the wet death." And nowhere is this more front and center than John Carpenter's The Thing, the filmography of Herschel Gordon Lewis, and many of the works of David Cronenberg, the Baron of Blood himself. It's a push-pull dynamic of not wanting to watch but being unable to look away that intrigues us so. Part of the recreational aspect of the horror genre comes from this dynamic.
The problem is that the splatter flick which so loves the wet death is also considered among the most disreputable of horror sub-genres. The reason being that these films have the flimsiest excuses for plots imaginable. The plot and characters are only there to facilitate as much torture, death, mutilation, and dismemberment as possible. For those of particularly morbid curiosity that's enough. But for many more people, the repulsion is too strong and completely overcomes all sense of curiosity. The desire to not see overwhelms the desire to see and the push-pull dynamic is lost.
In short, shock factor is difficult to pull off. If you're going to use shock magic, understand that it significantly narrows your demographics. You put yourself in a position where picking the wrong audience will get you a bad reputation and your performance will be nothing but masturbation.
Sadly, many of the young lads who seek to perform shock magic make exactly that mistake. They have no real concept of horror or pathos and believe that any frightened reaction is a good one. They try to bludgeon you over the head with viscera (now there's a mental image) until you react. And as a result, the only person they're entertaining is themselves. It's selfish, boorish and immature. It's not horror, it's not spooky, it's just pointless shock jocking that any half-wit with access to a fake blood recipe could do.
So where does shock magic fit in? Ideally it should be presented to a paying crowd who knows what they're getting. Halloween events for example. It should not be done on the street. It should not be inflicted on innocent passers-by. It definitely should not be done when children are about. If you think that their disgusted reactions are success and a sign of talent and creativity on your part, then you need to stop putting two scoops of stupid in your breakfast cereal.
I'll wrap by saying that shock magic doesn't necessarily have to be horror. It can be done very tongue-in-cheek. It can be funny in an off-beat sort of way. But the basic rules of performance theory still apply. You're dealing with subject matter that is at once repellent and fascinating. You're playing with fire.
Thursday, September 16, 2010
Saturday, September 11, 2010
Spooky Magic 101 part II
Welcome back. Last time we talked about the meaning of horror itself. We established that we had to put people in the proper frame of mind for horror and let them scare themselves. Now we need to talk about how to pull that off practically.
Less Is More
You hear this all the time, but I'm willing to bet few people have explained to you how to use it effectively. Well, haunted magic provides an excellent context. Picture the scene if you will:
A dark, well-dressed medium is sitting with you and a few other guests around a table with a couple of candles and the lights turned low. Shadows are long and deep. The darkness gives everything a paradoxical sense of claustrophobia and depth as you gather around in the tiny pool of available light while also being unsure of just how deep the shadows go anymore. The medium speaks as if to a sitter seen only to him, something which may indeed be the case. You watch the one-sided conversation and can only infer what's going on by the medium's reactions. It's not going well. It's turning into something like an argument. The medium is sweating. You look back and forth to the other sitters as if seeking some sort of comfort or validation for your anxiety. The air feels a little staler than before. The medium keeps getting cut off in mid-sentence by whoever he's talking to. He keeps calling the name of his spirit guide but doesn't seem to be getting an answer. Seeming to humor the belligerent specter, the medium holds a piece of paper up to one of the candles. Writing is slowly forming in the scorch marks spelling out words. FIND THAT BASTARD HARLEY "Lights," the medium says with a sense of urgency. "Get the lights. We need to stop."
Now try reading that paragraph in the dark with all the lights in the room turned off. You looked over your shoulder didn't you? Now break that paragraph down. Think of how little action took place in it. There was a conflict between the medium and an unseen force. There was only one effect. But there was enough atmosphere that it put you in the right frame of mind. Did you hear any small noises in the room or outside your window or even in the next room? Were you anxious about investigating them?
People are very good at scaring themselves. Much better than you ever will be. But if you set the stage properly, you won't need to do any real work. Their imaginations will do all the heavy lifting. With that in mind, I'm going to give you a phrase that I want you to write down and put it some place visible in your practice space:
The shadow of a knife is scarier than the knife itself.
Yeah, I know that's an odd thing to say, even for me. Are you a fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000? In season 8 they riffed a movie called, I'm not kidding, The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies. It was a truly incomprehensible film with a writer/director/star who looked like a cross between Nicholas Cage and a Moai statue, and a cast of other oily people with giant hair and little discernible talent. And musical numbers for some reason. Anyway, there was one scene that actually stood out to me at the time. After Nicholas-Cage-looking-guy zombies out and kills someone conveniently and cheaply off-screen, her date arrives at the house and wonders why the lights suddenly have gone out. He opens the front door and walks in, seen only in shadow through the light coming in through the front door. Nicholas-Cage-looking-guy comes up behind him and stabs him in the neck, the camera cutting away the very instant the knife makes contact. Again, that killing is seen only in shadow.
I was about 14 or 15 at the time. Spooked the hell out of me. The movie was really boring and I couldn't make heads or tails of the plot. But that one scene stuck with me. I found out much later that the movie was shot by one Vilmos Szigmond. Mr. Szigmond is a famous and highly respected cinematographer. With a name like that, what other career was he going to have? Anyway, he went on to make a lot of genre flicks, as well as some really good movies like Deer Hunter and The Bonfire of the Vanities. He won an Oscar in '78 for Close Encounters of the Third Kind. My point is, this is a man who knows how to make a good image. That shot of the killing in shadow was one of those moments of a bad movie that got one thing right in a big way. And that's why we're going to use it now. The shadow of a knife is scarier than the knife itself.
One thing that mentalists are generally better at than magicians is the use of implication. This probably has something to do with the fact that mentalism is a much more implicit experience by and large and lacks the sort of sensory extravagance of traditional magic. The sad thing is that most magic could do with less talk and exposition and more actual magic. As Elvis Presley famously said, a little less conversation, a little more action please.
Horror fiction is interesting in that well-written prose understand that showing is better than telling, and that implying can be more effective that showing. Stephen King's fantastic novel "Pet Semetary" is a fine example of this, merely hinting at some of the more disturbing themes such as cannibalism and having a bleak, defeatist ending that still goes out leaving so much to the imagination. Compare to that to the movie that left almost nothing to the imagination. Of course if we're being honest, my favorite part of the movie was the Ramones song so make of that what you will.
Horror film used to understand the concept of less is more much better in the past and this was largely due to technical limitations. Special effects were very primitive and crude. It wasn't until the 1960's when Hammer Films eroticized horror and pornographer Herschel Gorden Lewis invented the splatter flick that gore and explicit content became the order of the day.
However, it wasn't until the 1980's that this sort of subtlety truly started to be ignored. As we'll detail in a later entry, the 80's was an era of excesses. It was also the point when special effects tech really jumped ahead. And while this produced some really good movies like David Cronenberg's The Fly and John Carpenter's The Thing and An American Werewolf in London, it also produced a lot of direct-to-video crap. The nadir for less-is-more in cinema is arguably the brief period of mainstream popularity enjoyed by the torture porn sub-genre, which started with Saw and Hostel and ended pretty decisively with the box office flop of Captivity, quite possibly the stupidest, most pointlessly sick movie ever made.
Video games are experiencing a similar problem. Early horror games, as the linked video in the previous entry pointed out, had to work within technological limitations. One of the best examples of this remains Silent Hill 2. The PS2 was very strong technology for its generation, but it still had limits. Konami kept the thick fog from the first game in order to limit the draw distance and deliberately kept everything just ever so slightly out of focus so that they wouldn't have to render as many textures. The result was picture perfect atmosphere for horror, plus indistinct features on the monsters that left room for the player's imagination. And they didn't stop there either. In for a penny, in for a pound. Since the game's aesthetic was built so heavily on allowing your imagination to fill in the gaps, they also presented this derelict town with a handful of other characters who were universally unreliable and never seemed to see the same things you did, leaving you to wonder just what the hell was going on. Furthermore, the scenery was littered with enigmas such as the famous graffiti piece, "THERE WAS A HOLE HERE. IT'S GONE NOW."
But nowadays, games want to show off their technology. Every texture is rendered with realism rivaled only by James Cameron's most recent cash cow. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it's often done in a manner of just giving the level and character designers an ego boost. The graphics wars are to video games what the weekend box office totals are to Hollywood. It's a pointless game of one-up-manship that's only holding the industry back.
So take a moment to think about what you're doing. Are you providing too much exposition? Are you explaining too much? Are you taking the mystery out of mystery entertainment? Are you leaving anything to the imagination? If you really want to make a scary routine this Halloween, you need to learn to let the audience scare themselves. The shadow of a knife is scarier than the knife itself.
Now, as promised we'll wrap up with some recommended movies.
Nosferatu (1922): The first vampire film ever made and still one of the best. The original Symphony of Horror.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956): This was the beginning of the paranoid horror movie playing on the anxieties and xenophobia of the 1950's to create a ubiquitous and Freudian uncanny enemy.
Psycho (1960): One of the most iconic films in history and to this day it's still scary and disturbing. A perfect example of the Neo-Gothic.
Carnival of Souls (1962): Produced on the cheap by educational documentarian Herk Harvey, this is still a monumental and significant film for its innovative use of sound and silence, atmosphere, and haunting imagery. Avoid the 1998 remake like the bloody plague.
Rosemary's Baby (1968): Polanski's career defining masterpiece still resonates today for its portrayal of paranoia and creeping dread. There is very little explicit content, no blood, and yet it's one of the most haunting films ever made. This shows you don't need to be some whacked out creepazoid carrying severed body parts to be scary.
Halloween (1978): Forget the sequels. This film is often imitated but never equaled. Unlike the slashers the followed it, the film contains little actual blood, only a few on-screen kills, and a nail-biting buildup of tension to the eventual climax.
The Thing (1982): The 80's were no less a paranoid time than the 50's. And though the Cold War is over, modern anxieties over terrorists and extremists make the story of the enemy within just poignant today as ever before. Here we have one of the most frightening movies ever made because it's so unpredictable and it alternates between showing us every disturbing detail and then giving us nothing. From the spectacle of the wet death to being left with only our own paranoia. Take away the right lessons from this and you'll learn a lot about being scary.
Less Is More
You hear this all the time, but I'm willing to bet few people have explained to you how to use it effectively. Well, haunted magic provides an excellent context. Picture the scene if you will:
A dark, well-dressed medium is sitting with you and a few other guests around a table with a couple of candles and the lights turned low. Shadows are long and deep. The darkness gives everything a paradoxical sense of claustrophobia and depth as you gather around in the tiny pool of available light while also being unsure of just how deep the shadows go anymore. The medium speaks as if to a sitter seen only to him, something which may indeed be the case. You watch the one-sided conversation and can only infer what's going on by the medium's reactions. It's not going well. It's turning into something like an argument. The medium is sweating. You look back and forth to the other sitters as if seeking some sort of comfort or validation for your anxiety. The air feels a little staler than before. The medium keeps getting cut off in mid-sentence by whoever he's talking to. He keeps calling the name of his spirit guide but doesn't seem to be getting an answer. Seeming to humor the belligerent specter, the medium holds a piece of paper up to one of the candles. Writing is slowly forming in the scorch marks spelling out words. FIND THAT BASTARD HARLEY "Lights," the medium says with a sense of urgency. "Get the lights. We need to stop."
Now try reading that paragraph in the dark with all the lights in the room turned off. You looked over your shoulder didn't you? Now break that paragraph down. Think of how little action took place in it. There was a conflict between the medium and an unseen force. There was only one effect. But there was enough atmosphere that it put you in the right frame of mind. Did you hear any small noises in the room or outside your window or even in the next room? Were you anxious about investigating them?
People are very good at scaring themselves. Much better than you ever will be. But if you set the stage properly, you won't need to do any real work. Their imaginations will do all the heavy lifting. With that in mind, I'm going to give you a phrase that I want you to write down and put it some place visible in your practice space:
The shadow of a knife is scarier than the knife itself.
Yeah, I know that's an odd thing to say, even for me. Are you a fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000? In season 8 they riffed a movie called, I'm not kidding, The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies. It was a truly incomprehensible film with a writer/director/star who looked like a cross between Nicholas Cage and a Moai statue, and a cast of other oily people with giant hair and little discernible talent. And musical numbers for some reason. Anyway, there was one scene that actually stood out to me at the time. After Nicholas-Cage-looking-guy zombies out and kills someone conveniently and cheaply off-screen, her date arrives at the house and wonders why the lights suddenly have gone out. He opens the front door and walks in, seen only in shadow through the light coming in through the front door. Nicholas-Cage-looking-guy comes up behind him and stabs him in the neck, the camera cutting away the very instant the knife makes contact. Again, that killing is seen only in shadow.
I was about 14 or 15 at the time. Spooked the hell out of me. The movie was really boring and I couldn't make heads or tails of the plot. But that one scene stuck with me. I found out much later that the movie was shot by one Vilmos Szigmond. Mr. Szigmond is a famous and highly respected cinematographer. With a name like that, what other career was he going to have? Anyway, he went on to make a lot of genre flicks, as well as some really good movies like Deer Hunter and The Bonfire of the Vanities. He won an Oscar in '78 for Close Encounters of the Third Kind. My point is, this is a man who knows how to make a good image. That shot of the killing in shadow was one of those moments of a bad movie that got one thing right in a big way. And that's why we're going to use it now. The shadow of a knife is scarier than the knife itself.
One thing that mentalists are generally better at than magicians is the use of implication. This probably has something to do with the fact that mentalism is a much more implicit experience by and large and lacks the sort of sensory extravagance of traditional magic. The sad thing is that most magic could do with less talk and exposition and more actual magic. As Elvis Presley famously said, a little less conversation, a little more action please.
Horror fiction is interesting in that well-written prose understand that showing is better than telling, and that implying can be more effective that showing. Stephen King's fantastic novel "Pet Semetary" is a fine example of this, merely hinting at some of the more disturbing themes such as cannibalism and having a bleak, defeatist ending that still goes out leaving so much to the imagination. Compare to that to the movie that left almost nothing to the imagination. Of course if we're being honest, my favorite part of the movie was the Ramones song so make of that what you will.
Horror film used to understand the concept of less is more much better in the past and this was largely due to technical limitations. Special effects were very primitive and crude. It wasn't until the 1960's when Hammer Films eroticized horror and pornographer Herschel Gorden Lewis invented the splatter flick that gore and explicit content became the order of the day.
However, it wasn't until the 1980's that this sort of subtlety truly started to be ignored. As we'll detail in a later entry, the 80's was an era of excesses. It was also the point when special effects tech really jumped ahead. And while this produced some really good movies like David Cronenberg's The Fly and John Carpenter's The Thing and An American Werewolf in London, it also produced a lot of direct-to-video crap. The nadir for less-is-more in cinema is arguably the brief period of mainstream popularity enjoyed by the torture porn sub-genre, which started with Saw and Hostel and ended pretty decisively with the box office flop of Captivity, quite possibly the stupidest, most pointlessly sick movie ever made.
Video games are experiencing a similar problem. Early horror games, as the linked video in the previous entry pointed out, had to work within technological limitations. One of the best examples of this remains Silent Hill 2. The PS2 was very strong technology for its generation, but it still had limits. Konami kept the thick fog from the first game in order to limit the draw distance and deliberately kept everything just ever so slightly out of focus so that they wouldn't have to render as many textures. The result was picture perfect atmosphere for horror, plus indistinct features on the monsters that left room for the player's imagination. And they didn't stop there either. In for a penny, in for a pound. Since the game's aesthetic was built so heavily on allowing your imagination to fill in the gaps, they also presented this derelict town with a handful of other characters who were universally unreliable and never seemed to see the same things you did, leaving you to wonder just what the hell was going on. Furthermore, the scenery was littered with enigmas such as the famous graffiti piece, "THERE WAS A HOLE HERE. IT'S GONE NOW."
But nowadays, games want to show off their technology. Every texture is rendered with realism rivaled only by James Cameron's most recent cash cow. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it's often done in a manner of just giving the level and character designers an ego boost. The graphics wars are to video games what the weekend box office totals are to Hollywood. It's a pointless game of one-up-manship that's only holding the industry back.
So take a moment to think about what you're doing. Are you providing too much exposition? Are you explaining too much? Are you taking the mystery out of mystery entertainment? Are you leaving anything to the imagination? If you really want to make a scary routine this Halloween, you need to learn to let the audience scare themselves. The shadow of a knife is scarier than the knife itself.
Now, as promised we'll wrap up with some recommended movies.
Nosferatu (1922): The first vampire film ever made and still one of the best. The original Symphony of Horror.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956): This was the beginning of the paranoid horror movie playing on the anxieties and xenophobia of the 1950's to create a ubiquitous and Freudian uncanny enemy.
Psycho (1960): One of the most iconic films in history and to this day it's still scary and disturbing. A perfect example of the Neo-Gothic.
Carnival of Souls (1962): Produced on the cheap by educational documentarian Herk Harvey, this is still a monumental and significant film for its innovative use of sound and silence, atmosphere, and haunting imagery. Avoid the 1998 remake like the bloody plague.
Rosemary's Baby (1968): Polanski's career defining masterpiece still resonates today for its portrayal of paranoia and creeping dread. There is very little explicit content, no blood, and yet it's one of the most haunting films ever made. This shows you don't need to be some whacked out creepazoid carrying severed body parts to be scary.
Halloween (1978): Forget the sequels. This film is often imitated but never equaled. Unlike the slashers the followed it, the film contains little actual blood, only a few on-screen kills, and a nail-biting buildup of tension to the eventual climax.
The Thing (1982): The 80's were no less a paranoid time than the 50's. And though the Cold War is over, modern anxieties over terrorists and extremists make the story of the enemy within just poignant today as ever before. Here we have one of the most frightening movies ever made because it's so unpredictable and it alternates between showing us every disturbing detail and then giving us nothing. From the spectacle of the wet death to being left with only our own paranoia. Take away the right lessons from this and you'll learn a lot about being scary.
Saturday, September 4, 2010
Spooky Magic 101 part I
Since Halloween is fast approaching once more, I'll be dedicating posts over the next few weeks specifically to teaching effective spooky magic, a topic that is near and dear to the hearts of many a young magician.
Horror
This is where it all starts. You can't be funny if you've never heard a joke. You can't be romantic if you've never felt attracted to someone. And you can't be scary if you don't understand horror. So how do you learn? Fortunately, most of us have already been scared by something. We have our own little pet fears, there are certain nightmares we always remember, and there's probably that one movie that scared the bejeezus out of you as a kid that still invokes a little shiver even today. So that's where you start. The trick is understanding it. Allow me to provide you with a link to a specific episode of the series Extra Credits playing at The Escapist online magazine. Yes, I know, technically it's about video games but James Portnow and Daniel Floyd are very astute, intelligent, and eloquent, to say nothing of their collective experience in the entertainment industry. They make a lot of very thoughtful and important points about horror and its use in interactive media.
I've blogged in the past that close-up magic and gaming are interactive, and by their very nature require a different language than media such as film or prose. Watch that video a second time and consider what James says about horror as a genre. Now combine that with the writing of film critic Robin Wood who asserted that horror as a genre analyzed that which a culture had repressed. Heavy stuff.
I want you to hang onto this mind set. To be scary, it is less about what you do tell them and more about what you don't. Less is always going to be more. Imply instead of tell, use symbols instead of words, present a mystery that seems to have no answer. Some of you may think that you already do that last one, seeing as how you're a magician and all. But the truth is most magicians don't even get that right. They usually give a painfully stupid explanation for what's about to happen. Don't believe me? Check out any YouTube video of an ambitious card routine. I'm sorry in advance for the pain you will suffer if you take me up on that.
There's a lot of stuff out there that provides you with examples both good and bad about to make effective horror. The classic Silent Hill 2 game baffled players with its Freudian imagery and enigmatic scenery such as the infamous bit of graffiti reading, "There was a hole here. It's gone now." On the other side of the spectrum, the makers of the film Paranormal Activity made a movie building up to an important climax and cop out with a BOO moment. Even more baffling is one of the alternate endings on the DVD, which is much more artistic and leaves room for huge doubts and questions from the audience about what really transpired and why. Questions that will purposefully go unanswered.
It's actually much more difficult than it looks to pull this off. Now that we've established some parameters for horror, I'm going to leave off today's post with a list of recommended reading. A small sampling of horror novels to whet your appetite and get you in the proper frame of mind. I highly suggest you read all of them. Not all at once perhaps, but it's still important that you read them. You can't write horror until you've experienced it. Each book will be followed by an Amazon link formy benefit your convenience. In a few days, will talk about how to use less as more and end that day's lesson with some recommended movies. Pleasant dreams.
Dracula - Not the movies, the book. I love the movies, but this is one of the most important horror novels ever written. It is not without its flaws, but the imagery and visceral undercurrents are timeless. Don't make the mistake of passing this up.
Frankenstein - Again, pass on the movies until you've read the book. This is an important piece of Romantic era and Gothic literature as well as being arguably the first science fiction novel. The use of frame tale narrative, the imagery and symbolism, and the continually developing story of the monster itself have made it a timeless masterpiece.
I Am Legend - You've heard me give Richard Matheson a lot of credit before. This seminal novel has spawned several film adaptations, none of which can equal the original prose. Seriously, get it. Now. And no, I'm not happy about the most available copy being the one with the crappy Will Smith movie on the cover.
Nightmare at 20,000 Feet: Horror Stories by Richard Matheson - For more reasons on why you should buy this, please see my earlier post, Why You're An Idiot for Not Reading Richard Matheson.
The Collected Ghost Stories of MR James - If you want to do seances, haunted magic, and spirit theater, you need to familiarize yourself with the classic ghost story first. This is one of the best places to start, bar none.
Horror
This is where it all starts. You can't be funny if you've never heard a joke. You can't be romantic if you've never felt attracted to someone. And you can't be scary if you don't understand horror. So how do you learn? Fortunately, most of us have already been scared by something. We have our own little pet fears, there are certain nightmares we always remember, and there's probably that one movie that scared the bejeezus out of you as a kid that still invokes a little shiver even today. So that's where you start. The trick is understanding it. Allow me to provide you with a link to a specific episode of the series Extra Credits playing at The Escapist online magazine. Yes, I know, technically it's about video games but James Portnow and Daniel Floyd are very astute, intelligent, and eloquent, to say nothing of their collective experience in the entertainment industry. They make a lot of very thoughtful and important points about horror and its use in interactive media.
I've blogged in the past that close-up magic and gaming are interactive, and by their very nature require a different language than media such as film or prose. Watch that video a second time and consider what James says about horror as a genre. Now combine that with the writing of film critic Robin Wood who asserted that horror as a genre analyzed that which a culture had repressed. Heavy stuff.
I want you to hang onto this mind set. To be scary, it is less about what you do tell them and more about what you don't. Less is always going to be more. Imply instead of tell, use symbols instead of words, present a mystery that seems to have no answer. Some of you may think that you already do that last one, seeing as how you're a magician and all. But the truth is most magicians don't even get that right. They usually give a painfully stupid explanation for what's about to happen. Don't believe me? Check out any YouTube video of an ambitious card routine. I'm sorry in advance for the pain you will suffer if you take me up on that.
There's a lot of stuff out there that provides you with examples both good and bad about to make effective horror. The classic Silent Hill 2 game baffled players with its Freudian imagery and enigmatic scenery such as the infamous bit of graffiti reading, "There was a hole here. It's gone now." On the other side of the spectrum, the makers of the film Paranormal Activity made a movie building up to an important climax and cop out with a BOO moment. Even more baffling is one of the alternate endings on the DVD, which is much more artistic and leaves room for huge doubts and questions from the audience about what really transpired and why. Questions that will purposefully go unanswered.
It's actually much more difficult than it looks to pull this off. Now that we've established some parameters for horror, I'm going to leave off today's post with a list of recommended reading. A small sampling of horror novels to whet your appetite and get you in the proper frame of mind. I highly suggest you read all of them. Not all at once perhaps, but it's still important that you read them. You can't write horror until you've experienced it. Each book will be followed by an Amazon link for
Dracula - Not the movies, the book. I love the movies, but this is one of the most important horror novels ever written. It is not without its flaws, but the imagery and visceral undercurrents are timeless. Don't make the mistake of passing this up.
Frankenstein - Again, pass on the movies until you've read the book. This is an important piece of Romantic era and Gothic literature as well as being arguably the first science fiction novel. The use of frame tale narrative, the imagery and symbolism, and the continually developing story of the monster itself have made it a timeless masterpiece.
I Am Legend - You've heard me give Richard Matheson a lot of credit before. This seminal novel has spawned several film adaptations, none of which can equal the original prose. Seriously, get it. Now. And no, I'm not happy about the most available copy being the one with the crappy Will Smith movie on the cover.
Nightmare at 20,000 Feet: Horror Stories by Richard Matheson - For more reasons on why you should buy this, please see my earlier post, Why You're An Idiot for Not Reading Richard Matheson.
The Collected Ghost Stories of MR James - If you want to do seances, haunted magic, and spirit theater, you need to familiarize yourself with the classic ghost story first. This is one of the best places to start, bar none.
Friday, September 3, 2010
Escalation
Today I want to talk briefly about a topic that's been on my mind a lot recently: escalation. At a recent lecture, Jon Stetson expressed his distaste for the Liquid Metal DVD produced by Morgan Strebler. Jon stated that in his eyes, such a stunt was reducing metal bending to the realm of balloon twisting. It makes a good magic trick, but it's hardly mentalism.
This wasn't the first time such thoughts had occurred to me, but it was the first time I got to really talk to someone about it. Where it first came up was in the context of Star Wars. I'm not going to get into the debate of original versions versus special editions because it bores me. What I do want to get into is where the franchise has gone since the original trilogy. My first exposure to Star Wars was through the special editions during their first theatrical release. It had a big effect on me, transforming me into the sci-fi/fantasy geek that I am today.
But I ask you to look at the depictions of Jedi and the Force in context to the franchise now. Compare Yoda lifting the X-wing out of the swamp to The Force Unleashed, in which your character uses the Force to pull down a Star Destroyer. Compare the original Death Star to the ridiculously overkill Sun Crusher from "Dark Empire." The more they expand the universe of the series, the more each new writer tries to one-up the others. They don't do it through clever narrative twists, excellent character development, or anything else nearly as interesting. No, they do it through escalation, constantly trying to pile on more absurd spectacle to make credulous consumers go, "Awesome!"
The problem here is that it's a losing battle. When you compete with everyone else in a shiny objects contest to see who can attract the most magpies, your inevitable defeat and slide into unemployment and obscurity is just a matter of time. Spectacle is ever evolving, but the pillars of great art and entertainment remain timeless. And one of those pillars is that less is more.
Seeing Luke fail to lift the X-Wing and then see Yoda do it is way different from having the Apprentice move a Star Destroyer just because some hack writer thought it was more epic. We saw Luke try and fail. When Yoda moves it, the drama is increased. And on top of that, it looks real! The X-Wing moves like a gigantic, super-heavy thing being shifted around would. In The Force Unleashed, you can't tell if it's the Force moving the damn thing, or if the navigator just got drunk.
Morgan Strebler's Liquid Metal is in a similar place. It's a nice spectacle, but it lacks a realistic awe and mystery. First the fork does this. Then it does this. Then it does this. Then it does this. I can't think of anything more boring than that. There's no sense of timing or drama or tension.
And what drives me berserk is hearing people continually say, "But it's so awesome! Not everything has to be artistic, you know." What a cheap cop-out. It's so defeatist and lazy. It's basically saying, "I don't have to do a good job, so I won't." And that's how we end up with junk like Vampires Suck, Ke$ha, and most Harlequin romance novels. They're all producing a cheap, throw-away product to pander to a very defeatist demographic who are content to consume nothing but the entertainment equivalent of junk food. And just as eating nothing but Twinkies is bad for your body, consuming too much spectacle fodder is bad for your mind.
Before I get someone jumping on me about this, I do believe that hollow, feel-good escapism has its place. But don't expect everyone to automatically embrace your laziness if all you can do is crank out brainless spectacles. And certainly don't expect me to give you a pass.
So think about what you're doing with your magic. Are you just giving them spectacle? Or an actual mystery?
This wasn't the first time such thoughts had occurred to me, but it was the first time I got to really talk to someone about it. Where it first came up was in the context of Star Wars. I'm not going to get into the debate of original versions versus special editions because it bores me. What I do want to get into is where the franchise has gone since the original trilogy. My first exposure to Star Wars was through the special editions during their first theatrical release. It had a big effect on me, transforming me into the sci-fi/fantasy geek that I am today.
But I ask you to look at the depictions of Jedi and the Force in context to the franchise now. Compare Yoda lifting the X-wing out of the swamp to The Force Unleashed, in which your character uses the Force to pull down a Star Destroyer. Compare the original Death Star to the ridiculously overkill Sun Crusher from "Dark Empire." The more they expand the universe of the series, the more each new writer tries to one-up the others. They don't do it through clever narrative twists, excellent character development, or anything else nearly as interesting. No, they do it through escalation, constantly trying to pile on more absurd spectacle to make credulous consumers go, "Awesome!"
The problem here is that it's a losing battle. When you compete with everyone else in a shiny objects contest to see who can attract the most magpies, your inevitable defeat and slide into unemployment and obscurity is just a matter of time. Spectacle is ever evolving, but the pillars of great art and entertainment remain timeless. And one of those pillars is that less is more.
Seeing Luke fail to lift the X-Wing and then see Yoda do it is way different from having the Apprentice move a Star Destroyer just because some hack writer thought it was more epic. We saw Luke try and fail. When Yoda moves it, the drama is increased. And on top of that, it looks real! The X-Wing moves like a gigantic, super-heavy thing being shifted around would. In The Force Unleashed, you can't tell if it's the Force moving the damn thing, or if the navigator just got drunk.
Morgan Strebler's Liquid Metal is in a similar place. It's a nice spectacle, but it lacks a realistic awe and mystery. First the fork does this. Then it does this. Then it does this. Then it does this. I can't think of anything more boring than that. There's no sense of timing or drama or tension.
And what drives me berserk is hearing people continually say, "But it's so awesome! Not everything has to be artistic, you know." What a cheap cop-out. It's so defeatist and lazy. It's basically saying, "I don't have to do a good job, so I won't." And that's how we end up with junk like Vampires Suck, Ke$ha, and most Harlequin romance novels. They're all producing a cheap, throw-away product to pander to a very defeatist demographic who are content to consume nothing but the entertainment equivalent of junk food. And just as eating nothing but Twinkies is bad for your body, consuming too much spectacle fodder is bad for your mind.
Before I get someone jumping on me about this, I do believe that hollow, feel-good escapism has its place. But don't expect everyone to automatically embrace your laziness if all you can do is crank out brainless spectacles. And certainly don't expect me to give you a pass.
So think about what you're doing with your magic. Are you just giving them spectacle? Or an actual mystery?
Sunday, August 29, 2010
3 Ways to Increase Your Creativity
The creative process varies from individual to individual. Thom Wolfe was known to put himself through all sorts of weird processes to write, including sitting in his kitchen sink simply because he'd never done that before. While it takes time to work out your own process, there are some exercises that can help.
3. Keep a Dream Journal
When our brains go into REM mode during sleep, that's when dreaming occurs. Most of it is nearly impossible to remember, but the recall is there if you just get used to it. Keeping a dream journal is the best way to tap into this.
Keep a notebook and pen next to your bed. Get into the habit every morning of writing down what you remember about your dreams. It won't be much at first, but within about a week, you'll start remembering more and be able to write more detailed logs. After a couple months, you might even be able to trigger lucid dreams.
The reason this is a boon to your creativity is because it shuts off the analytical left brain. I've recorded dreams about visiting a town where a pirate is the mayor, where I'm driving the Mach 5, and one in which a demon in the art style of the Scott Pilgrim vs the World graphic novels questions me about my dreams. Your right brain isn't terribly critical of what goes on in dreams, so you end up with these bizarre juxtapositions of logically incompatible ideas.
However, this also means that recorded dreams make interesting fodder for creativity, sometimes providing the seed of an idea. Your brain is simply jumbling together ideas that it's been mulling over for the last couple of days. The connections it sometimes forms are the sort of thing you normally would never think of when conscious because your left brain is being way too critical of content.
If this also leads you to experience lucid dreaming, that has advantages as well. You can rehearse performances, reinforce knowledge you already have, practice a skill, and improve your memory and recall. Of course, this will take some time to get used to and it may be months before you achieve actual lucid dreams. I suggest you do some reading on the subject if you're interested.
Otherwise, just keep a dream journal. Remember to write your dreams down immediately upon waking. Don't get up to stretch and dress. Don't stare at the ceiling. You need to preserve the visions of the dream on paper before they fade away.
2. Clustering
This a freewriting type of exercise that I'm fond of. I discuss it along with others in my ebook "Say What?" It works well for people with very visual imaginations. What you do is write down a single thought. For the sake of example, let's say it's storms. Write it in the center of a blank page and circle it. This is your keystone thought.
Now write down all the things your keystone makes you think of, circle them, and draw a line connecting them to the keystone. Lightning, howling winds, dark clouds, pitch darkness, cold, rain, and so on in this example.
Now repeat the process with every new little node. Lightning makes me think of violence, inspiration, thunderclaps, destruction. Rain makes me think of rejuvenation, flooding, the scent of water in the air, the drumming of falling rain, mist, fog, and summer. Pitch darkness makes me think of isolation, obscurity, fear, night, and so on.
Just keep repeating the process for each node until there's no more room on the page. You now have a mental road map of imaginative connections between disparate elements. The more connections you make, the more you start to see possibilities open up before you. You can explore possibilities you never thought of before. IN this little example, I already got the seed of an idea for a routine using some stage hypnosis and a murder mystery story using effects such as getting people to smell the scent of rain even though there isn't a cloud in the sky.
If you're familiar with freewriting and other concepts, clustering should come naturally to you. Effectively, this is freewriting in a visual format. Experiment with it and see where it takes you. It's an effective way to turn off the analytical left brain for a few minutes, and once you get the feel for it, you can try similar methods such as automatic writing and cave writing.
1. Think Like a Time Traveler
As an avid gamer I've tried out numerous systems, settings, and genres. Pen'n'paper RPGs are still my favorite for truly expansive thinking since so much more is possible when you have a game master responding to your ideas and actions in real time. On that note, I point to a concept from an underrated gem published by Wizards of the Coast called Urban Arcana.
As the name suggests, it's an urban fantasy game. Among suggestions for the players and game master, it recommends that you learn to think like a person displaced in time and space. Go to a hardware store and put yourself in the frame of mind of not knowing what most of the stuff is. Think of the most outrageous uses and explanations for these things that you can. That is every day of a time traveling wizard's life.
Through this exercise, you end up coming up with some pretty interesting ideas. As an example, here's a list of some of the spells and magic items described in the Urban Arcana rule book:
I'm working on an effect based on that last premise, incidentally. Part of my Dr. Question Mark show.
Anyway, the point is that you start thinking of things not as what they are but what they could be. It's a call back to the days of childhood imagination. For a child, the impossible is only a matter of time. One of the unique challenges to doing magic for children is that they don't take things for granted as adults do. Everything around you could do something fantastic and they're waiting for it happen. Consequently, you can't rely on surprising them as much. But that's tangential to the point.
The message here is to exercise your creativity by thinking laterally and observing possibilities instead of facts. A lot of comedy is based on this as well. You see it frequently in Mystery Science Theater 3000.
"He's got two huge Sudafed on top of his car." (lights on a police car)
"I think the Tin Man had that thing surgically removed." (a small satellite)
"This is the most complicated beer bong I've ever seen." (lab equipment)
"Eat this baguette! Eat it!" (guy getting hit with a 2x4)
Next time you're out in public, give it a try. Consider mundane objects and start thinking of them in a totally new context.
3. Keep a Dream Journal
When our brains go into REM mode during sleep, that's when dreaming occurs. Most of it is nearly impossible to remember, but the recall is there if you just get used to it. Keeping a dream journal is the best way to tap into this.
Keep a notebook and pen next to your bed. Get into the habit every morning of writing down what you remember about your dreams. It won't be much at first, but within about a week, you'll start remembering more and be able to write more detailed logs. After a couple months, you might even be able to trigger lucid dreams.
The reason this is a boon to your creativity is because it shuts off the analytical left brain. I've recorded dreams about visiting a town where a pirate is the mayor, where I'm driving the Mach 5, and one in which a demon in the art style of the Scott Pilgrim vs the World graphic novels questions me about my dreams. Your right brain isn't terribly critical of what goes on in dreams, so you end up with these bizarre juxtapositions of logically incompatible ideas.
However, this also means that recorded dreams make interesting fodder for creativity, sometimes providing the seed of an idea. Your brain is simply jumbling together ideas that it's been mulling over for the last couple of days. The connections it sometimes forms are the sort of thing you normally would never think of when conscious because your left brain is being way too critical of content.
If this also leads you to experience lucid dreaming, that has advantages as well. You can rehearse performances, reinforce knowledge you already have, practice a skill, and improve your memory and recall. Of course, this will take some time to get used to and it may be months before you achieve actual lucid dreams. I suggest you do some reading on the subject if you're interested.
Otherwise, just keep a dream journal. Remember to write your dreams down immediately upon waking. Don't get up to stretch and dress. Don't stare at the ceiling. You need to preserve the visions of the dream on paper before they fade away.
2. Clustering
This a freewriting type of exercise that I'm fond of. I discuss it along with others in my ebook "Say What?" It works well for people with very visual imaginations. What you do is write down a single thought. For the sake of example, let's say it's storms. Write it in the center of a blank page and circle it. This is your keystone thought.
Now write down all the things your keystone makes you think of, circle them, and draw a line connecting them to the keystone. Lightning, howling winds, dark clouds, pitch darkness, cold, rain, and so on in this example.
Now repeat the process with every new little node. Lightning makes me think of violence, inspiration, thunderclaps, destruction. Rain makes me think of rejuvenation, flooding, the scent of water in the air, the drumming of falling rain, mist, fog, and summer. Pitch darkness makes me think of isolation, obscurity, fear, night, and so on.
Just keep repeating the process for each node until there's no more room on the page. You now have a mental road map of imaginative connections between disparate elements. The more connections you make, the more you start to see possibilities open up before you. You can explore possibilities you never thought of before. IN this little example, I already got the seed of an idea for a routine using some stage hypnosis and a murder mystery story using effects such as getting people to smell the scent of rain even though there isn't a cloud in the sky.
If you're familiar with freewriting and other concepts, clustering should come naturally to you. Effectively, this is freewriting in a visual format. Experiment with it and see where it takes you. It's an effective way to turn off the analytical left brain for a few minutes, and once you get the feel for it, you can try similar methods such as automatic writing and cave writing.
1. Think Like a Time Traveler
As an avid gamer I've tried out numerous systems, settings, and genres. Pen'n'paper RPGs are still my favorite for truly expansive thinking since so much more is possible when you have a game master responding to your ideas and actions in real time. On that note, I point to a concept from an underrated gem published by Wizards of the Coast called Urban Arcana.
As the name suggests, it's an urban fantasy game. Among suggestions for the players and game master, it recommends that you learn to think like a person displaced in time and space. Go to a hardware store and put yourself in the frame of mind of not knowing what most of the stuff is. Think of the most outrageous uses and explanations for these things that you can. That is every day of a time traveling wizard's life.
Through this exercise, you end up coming up with some pretty interesting ideas. As an example, here's a list of some of the spells and magic items described in the Urban Arcana rule book:
- A wristwatch that makes you faster.
- A bullseye tattoo that magically makes you a better shot.
- A backpack with an extradimensional interior of over 100 cubic feet.
- A spell that lets you teleport to the location of a telephone you're calling.
- A spell that disables all surveillance and security devices temporarily.
- A spell that lets you read barcodes and other data sources like a machine by running your finger over them.
I'm working on an effect based on that last premise, incidentally. Part of my Dr. Question Mark show.
Anyway, the point is that you start thinking of things not as what they are but what they could be. It's a call back to the days of childhood imagination. For a child, the impossible is only a matter of time. One of the unique challenges to doing magic for children is that they don't take things for granted as adults do. Everything around you could do something fantastic and they're waiting for it happen. Consequently, you can't rely on surprising them as much. But that's tangential to the point.
The message here is to exercise your creativity by thinking laterally and observing possibilities instead of facts. A lot of comedy is based on this as well. You see it frequently in Mystery Science Theater 3000.
"He's got two huge Sudafed on top of his car." (lights on a police car)
"I think the Tin Man had that thing surgically removed." (a small satellite)
"This is the most complicated beer bong I've ever seen." (lab equipment)
"Eat this baguette! Eat it!" (guy getting hit with a 2x4)
Next time you're out in public, give it a try. Consider mundane objects and start thinking of them in a totally new context.
Friday, August 27, 2010
The Real Work of Comedy
Kevin Murphy of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and RiffTrax fame posted to his Twitter today, a little joke.
You want to be funny? This is what goes on behind the scenes. Get to work.
A hazard of my work - did extensive research into the career of Ashlee Simpson. Used said research for a single joke. You're welcome.
You want to be funny? This is what goes on behind the scenes. Get to work.
Sunday, August 22, 2010
5 Ways You're Secretly Sabotaging Your Performance
Just get it out of your system. You think I'm high, don't you? You're getting good reactions, so how can you be sabotaging yourself? Well it turns out that people have a lot of curious habits that we developed a long time ago that actually aren't as helpful as we thought they were.
5. You Laugh Too Much and Too Soon
Laughter is great. It's probably one of the best bonding rituals in all of human psychology. But it's primary function is to dispel tension, as I mentioned in a previous entry. If you laugh first, then you are subconsciously communicating that you are experiencing tension between you and the audience and that you need to dispel it now because you can't take the pressure. Not exactly oozing confidence, wouldn't you say?
The temptation to laugh in order to create a chain effect is intense. But you have to train yourself to hold back and only laugh when appropriate. It goes without saying that if you laugh at your own jokes, you're a douchebag. Let the audience laugh first. If someone says something funny, by all means laugh yourself. But you have to maintain the mindset that there is no tension except what they feel. You don't need to relieve anything. Stay in control.
This will take time to get used to. As a society, we're encouraged to laugh or we look weird. Unfortunately, we end up taking it too far and we look weird anyway. But we're magicians and we have to remain in control. We all have to be like one big group of Fonzies: cool. Smile by all means. But cut back on laughing.
4. You Talk Too Much
The more you talk the greater the chance you'll say something banal. People who genuinely have the gift of the gab are few and far between. Most of us just don't know when to shut up. Trust me, I've been acquainted with more than a few magicians, some of them actually very successful, who turned out to be complete windbags.
I'm not unsympathetic. I never professed to be a humble man, and there's a voice in my head constantly saying to me, "Talk! Come on, talk! You've got a radio voice. People love to hear you talk. They should be grateful for your knowledge." I have to hold the urge in, though. There's a line between witty conversation and monopolizing the conversation.
By restraining yourself, you actually make the words that you do say more important. One bad habit most magicians have that you yourself might possess dear reader is the tendency to explain what's going on. A lot. Reign it in. The less information you give, the more valuable it becomes. Sales 101. Robert Cialdini wrote in his influential book "Influence" that you need to create a scarcity paradigm. Since nature abhors a vacuum, you put higher value and weight on that which you give very little of. If you're still a little shaky on this concept, a review of "Influence" is coming down the pipeline.
3. You're Over-Practiced
Rick Maue once told me, "If you're practicing for 2 or more hours a day, you're not performing enough." That's a controversial statement to say the least and it's irritated more than a few people I've mentioned it to. The fact of the matter is that it's very easy to build yourself a nice, secure comfort zone that ends at your bedroom door or webcam.
Have you ever met a dedicated bodybuilder? Would it surprise you to know that some of those guys don't get nearly as many women as you may think? They work hard to build up their strength and muscles. They have 12-inch pythons, legs like tree trunks, 6-pack abs, and a V-shaped body. But some of them only see the flaws. You say they look great. But they might say that they need to work on their delts more. Or they might think their right arm isn't symmetrical with the left. They become so focused on these little details that they miss the fact that most people envy them and a lot of women are lining up to hand over their phone numbers.
That's what an over-practiced magician sounds like. Oh no, my pass isn't invisible enough! I could kind of sort of see it in the mirror from a 27 degree angle. No, no, this two-handed cut isn't fast enough. That would totally disrupt the flow of my show. I can't go out in public yet! Have you seen how unbelievably sloppy my interlock production is?!
And before you ask, yes card specialists, I am singling you out. You're guilty more than anybody else.
You can read every text in the world on martial arts and practice the forms and combos until you've committed them to muscle memory, but in your first sparring match you're going to take a few hits. You'll probably even lose. There's no better teacher than experience. Consider that maybe your ratio of practice to performance is off-balance. I've seen guys who have infinitely better sleight of hand than me, but they can't connect with an audience half as well as I do. And some of them I may never know if they can, because I've never seen them perform for anything that wasn't a webcam.
Consider the early career of early-20th-century boxer Jack Johnson. He couldn't afford to hire a trainer, so he just learned the basics and then booked himself for every available fight, sometimes competing in over 20 matches a year. He trained himself in the crucible of experience and became a champion.
2. You're Using Dead Weight Material
Our brains are remarkably good at surviving, but not particularly good at functioning in society. Especially when it comes to money. We magicians tend to buy stuff and then not like it. But some of it you probably use anyway, because damn it, you paid for it! Your brain is really good at convincing itself that you're a savvy customer.
Simply put, your brain wants to think short-term. So if you've invested in something, it wants to believe that money was worth it, so you try to get some use out of it no matter what. You stay loyal to previous investments. When you spend money on stuff because you've already spent money on stuff like it, this is called the sunk cost fallacy.
Worse yet, you hang onto it for similar reasons. This is called the disposition effect. You're hanging onto something out of the optimistic assumption that its value will climb in time. In other words, "But I might need it later." Any gamers reading this are probably familiar with that thought. You hang onto material you don't use because you don't want to waste the money you spent on it. And instead of going eBay to try and recoup your costs or at least get some money back so that you only lost a few bucks on it, you keep it thinking that it might come in handy later. But it won't.
Go through your stuff, do an inventory of your books, DVDs, gimmicks and whathaveyous and ask yourself how much of it you actually use. How much of it do you use that just isn't that good? Be realistic. Is this stuff ever going to be useful? Get to eBay and clean up that bookshelf.
1. You Have No Plan
So you're getting good reactions. What kind of reactions? Why not great ones? Do you even know what kind of reactions you wanted to get in the first place? A lot of new magicians these days see the preview videos for new material or watch David Blaine and Criss Angel on TV and mistake volume for quality. But more than that, they don't really know what emotion they're trying to elicit.
And even supposing they do, they have no idea what it takes to get that reaction. I've met guys trying to be funny and get laughs, but they don't know anything about comedy. I've met guys who want to scare people, but they couldn't scare a kitten. It's like trying to drive a car blindfolded. And you can't drive a stick. Or at all.
Fact of the matter is that you need a game plan. You need to know what kind of reactions you want and how you can get them. Getting people to feel something specific is a lot harder than just taking the shotgun approach of trying to get any reaction, but the payoff is geometrically higher. People will remember a performance that got a specific emotion out of them long after they've forgotten Generic Card Trick #347. And more importantly, they'll remember you.
I've seen a few guys fall into the trap of thinking any reaction is a good one. They're performing the same bland, generic material day in and day out with very little personality or uniqueness. But they managed to get gasps out of their classmates or coworkers, so they imagine that they're already on the right path. Easy trap to fall into. Again, this is the shotgun approach. But what are shotguns? Situational weapons. They have their place, but if it's all you have, you're in for one hell of a rude awakening down the line.
5. You Laugh Too Much and Too Soon
Laughter is great. It's probably one of the best bonding rituals in all of human psychology. But it's primary function is to dispel tension, as I mentioned in a previous entry. If you laugh first, then you are subconsciously communicating that you are experiencing tension between you and the audience and that you need to dispel it now because you can't take the pressure. Not exactly oozing confidence, wouldn't you say?
The temptation to laugh in order to create a chain effect is intense. But you have to train yourself to hold back and only laugh when appropriate. It goes without saying that if you laugh at your own jokes, you're a douchebag. Let the audience laugh first. If someone says something funny, by all means laugh yourself. But you have to maintain the mindset that there is no tension except what they feel. You don't need to relieve anything. Stay in control.
This will take time to get used to. As a society, we're encouraged to laugh or we look weird. Unfortunately, we end up taking it too far and we look weird anyway. But we're magicians and we have to remain in control. We all have to be like one big group of Fonzies: cool. Smile by all means. But cut back on laughing.
4. You Talk Too Much
The more you talk the greater the chance you'll say something banal. People who genuinely have the gift of the gab are few and far between. Most of us just don't know when to shut up. Trust me, I've been acquainted with more than a few magicians, some of them actually very successful, who turned out to be complete windbags.
I'm not unsympathetic. I never professed to be a humble man, and there's a voice in my head constantly saying to me, "Talk! Come on, talk! You've got a radio voice. People love to hear you talk. They should be grateful for your knowledge." I have to hold the urge in, though. There's a line between witty conversation and monopolizing the conversation.
By restraining yourself, you actually make the words that you do say more important. One bad habit most magicians have that you yourself might possess dear reader is the tendency to explain what's going on. A lot. Reign it in. The less information you give, the more valuable it becomes. Sales 101. Robert Cialdini wrote in his influential book "Influence" that you need to create a scarcity paradigm. Since nature abhors a vacuum, you put higher value and weight on that which you give very little of. If you're still a little shaky on this concept, a review of "Influence" is coming down the pipeline.
3. You're Over-Practiced
Rick Maue once told me, "If you're practicing for 2 or more hours a day, you're not performing enough." That's a controversial statement to say the least and it's irritated more than a few people I've mentioned it to. The fact of the matter is that it's very easy to build yourself a nice, secure comfort zone that ends at your bedroom door or webcam.
Have you ever met a dedicated bodybuilder? Would it surprise you to know that some of those guys don't get nearly as many women as you may think? They work hard to build up their strength and muscles. They have 12-inch pythons, legs like tree trunks, 6-pack abs, and a V-shaped body. But some of them only see the flaws. You say they look great. But they might say that they need to work on their delts more. Or they might think their right arm isn't symmetrical with the left. They become so focused on these little details that they miss the fact that most people envy them and a lot of women are lining up to hand over their phone numbers.
That's what an over-practiced magician sounds like. Oh no, my pass isn't invisible enough! I could kind of sort of see it in the mirror from a 27 degree angle. No, no, this two-handed cut isn't fast enough. That would totally disrupt the flow of my show. I can't go out in public yet! Have you seen how unbelievably sloppy my interlock production is?!
And before you ask, yes card specialists, I am singling you out. You're guilty more than anybody else.
You can read every text in the world on martial arts and practice the forms and combos until you've committed them to muscle memory, but in your first sparring match you're going to take a few hits. You'll probably even lose. There's no better teacher than experience. Consider that maybe your ratio of practice to performance is off-balance. I've seen guys who have infinitely better sleight of hand than me, but they can't connect with an audience half as well as I do. And some of them I may never know if they can, because I've never seen them perform for anything that wasn't a webcam.
Consider the early career of early-20th-century boxer Jack Johnson. He couldn't afford to hire a trainer, so he just learned the basics and then booked himself for every available fight, sometimes competing in over 20 matches a year. He trained himself in the crucible of experience and became a champion.
2. You're Using Dead Weight Material
Our brains are remarkably good at surviving, but not particularly good at functioning in society. Especially when it comes to money. We magicians tend to buy stuff and then not like it. But some of it you probably use anyway, because damn it, you paid for it! Your brain is really good at convincing itself that you're a savvy customer.
Simply put, your brain wants to think short-term. So if you've invested in something, it wants to believe that money was worth it, so you try to get some use out of it no matter what. You stay loyal to previous investments. When you spend money on stuff because you've already spent money on stuff like it, this is called the sunk cost fallacy.
Worse yet, you hang onto it for similar reasons. This is called the disposition effect. You're hanging onto something out of the optimistic assumption that its value will climb in time. In other words, "But I might need it later." Any gamers reading this are probably familiar with that thought. You hang onto material you don't use because you don't want to waste the money you spent on it. And instead of going eBay to try and recoup your costs or at least get some money back so that you only lost a few bucks on it, you keep it thinking that it might come in handy later. But it won't.
Go through your stuff, do an inventory of your books, DVDs, gimmicks and whathaveyous and ask yourself how much of it you actually use. How much of it do you use that just isn't that good? Be realistic. Is this stuff ever going to be useful? Get to eBay and clean up that bookshelf.
1. You Have No Plan
So you're getting good reactions. What kind of reactions? Why not great ones? Do you even know what kind of reactions you wanted to get in the first place? A lot of new magicians these days see the preview videos for new material or watch David Blaine and Criss Angel on TV and mistake volume for quality. But more than that, they don't really know what emotion they're trying to elicit.
And even supposing they do, they have no idea what it takes to get that reaction. I've met guys trying to be funny and get laughs, but they don't know anything about comedy. I've met guys who want to scare people, but they couldn't scare a kitten. It's like trying to drive a car blindfolded. And you can't drive a stick. Or at all.
Fact of the matter is that you need a game plan. You need to know what kind of reactions you want and how you can get them. Getting people to feel something specific is a lot harder than just taking the shotgun approach of trying to get any reaction, but the payoff is geometrically higher. People will remember a performance that got a specific emotion out of them long after they've forgotten Generic Card Trick #347. And more importantly, they'll remember you.
I've seen a few guys fall into the trap of thinking any reaction is a good one. They're performing the same bland, generic material day in and day out with very little personality or uniqueness. But they managed to get gasps out of their classmates or coworkers, so they imagine that they're already on the right path. Easy trap to fall into. Again, this is the shotgun approach. But what are shotguns? Situational weapons. They have their place, but if it's all you have, you're in for one hell of a rude awakening down the line.
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